Your friendly neighbourhood geek

How do I back up multiple emails in Outlook Express?

I wanted a way to make backups of my emails in Outlook Express but the Save As option in the file menu only saves one message at a time. How do I do this?

Right, I didn’t realise there were people out there using Outlook Express, but I had a quick poke around and here’s a cool trick you might like to try:

Open the correct folder in Outlook Express and arrange the window so it only takes up half of the screen. Hold down the Ctrl button and left-click on all the emails that you want to save.

Click on the Start button and then My Documents to open a Windows Explorer window. Then create a new folder for the selected emails. Drag and drop the emails into this folder to create a copy. If you don’t want them in Outlook Express any more, they can now be deleted.

There you go, it doesn’t matter if your email is invitation to a non 12 step program or just a collection of jokes, you can now treat them as normal file system objects and back them up by making copies of them.